Amat Escalante, probably best known for his last film, Los Bastardos, picked up the Best Director prize in Cannes for this tense ultra-realistic depiction of a struggling Mexican family’s inexorable slide into a maelstrom of organised crime and a corrupt justice system.
Heli is a young man who lives with his wife, father, younger sister Estela, and baby son. After drugs are hidden on the roof of their home, without their knowledge, the family attempts to extricate itself from a hopeless situation. When the father destroys the drugs in an effort to bring the nightmare to an end, he unwittingly opens the family up to a vicious cycle of revenge from both sides of the law.
Eschewing more obvious genre story-telling, closure and cheap thrills, this is a deeply affecting film, with a tremendous thought provoking ending, which neatly side steps the clichés of the recent slew of Favela Action films.
Contains scenes some viewers may consider shocking.